FK Austria Wien

"Our IT environment has been virtualized for five years. With the new PRIMERGY servers, it is now 50% more efficient. Our new ETERNUS DX80 storage system and ETERNUS LT40 tape library have also dramatically increased the security of our IT systems"

Alexander Reisek,
Head of IT, FK Austria Wien

The customer

FK Austria Wien has been a key part of the Austrian football scene for over 100 years and is Vienna’s top team. The Bundesliga club has been Austrian champion 24 times and has also won the European Cup. They have qualified for the 2013-14 Champions League. Under the slogan “Violet is more than a color”, the team is well-known for fairness and campaigns rigorously against violence and racism. Behind the scenes, the club is supported by FK Austria Wien AG and its 100 or so employees.

The challenge

FK Austria Wien AG’s office is located in the Generali Arena in the Austrian capital. The original Fujitsu data center environment was to be replaced with more modern, powerful and efficient systems. As there had been no breakdowns at all in the past five years, another Fujitsu system was the obvious choice.

The solution

Sitexs-Databusiness IT-Solutions GmbH in Vienna - named Fujitsu‘s Austrian “Partner of the Year“ in 2012 - conceptualized a powerful, reliable environment with two PRIMERGY RX200 servers with the latest Intel Xeon processor technology, along with an ETERNUS DX80 storage system. To ensure that the system remains completely fail-safe, a PRIMERGY RX350 was installed in another part of the stadium. An ETERNUS LT40 tape library is now used as secure backup. The servers are also virtualized so that the resources can be used very flexibly.

The benefit

Increased reliability

Increased performance by more than 50%

Greater flexibility thanks to virtualization

Highly scalable

Dramatically reduced energy costs

When Alexander Reisek drives to work, there isn‘t a regular high-rise office block waiting for him. Instead, it‘s the Generali Arena in Vienna, a football stadium with space for more than 12,000 fans. While the violet eleven of FK Austria Wien battle it out on their home turf, Alexander Reisek takes care of the Austrian Champions League team‘s IT systems inside the stadium building. Here, there is a server room with two virtualized PRIMERGY RX200 S7 systems, which run the ticketing system, merchandise shop, accounting and email inboxes.

“The servers are super-fast and very reliable,“ explains the Head of IT for the Vienna club. The servers are fitted with the latest Intel Xeon processors, which don‘t just dramatically increase performance, but also greatly decrease power consumption. To increase security against breakdowns, there is another server room in another office location. This is around 50 meters outside of the stadium site. “If something happens in the stadium, we can carry on working in the other office via a failover server,“ says Reisek. Every application except the stadium access system is on this PRIMERGY RX350, as well as the backup system.

FK Austria Wien‘s executive board set out its requirements for more security in the stadium many years ago, but also wanted to ensure that service provisions for fans and customers would become more versatile. The CRM system brought the “Austria Live Card“ to life. This card improves organization for registered fans, but also provides added value for spectators such as special offers, members‘ parties or pre-sale access for international matches. To ensure that this sensitive data is stored securely, FK Austria Wien chose an ETERNUS DX80 system, which is connected to the two servers in the main data center. This contains all customer data, video analyses, game and training plans. “The capacity is measured in such a way that we currently have twice as much storage space as data,“ explains Reisek, who used to work as a junior trainer for FK Austria Wien. “If we ever do run out of space on this system, we can increase its capacity on the fly.“ To ensure that security here is as high as possible too, Reisek saves the data to the Fujitsu tape library every day. The tapes are stored in the backup data center, ready to restore the system.

Conclusion

FK Austria Wien‘s migration to its new system went incredibly smoothly. Alexander Reisek only had to interrupt the process for Champions League home games. All in all, the Head of IT, who knows just as much about virtualization as he does about the four-man defense, is very pleased with the new Fujitsu environment:

“Thanks to the new PRIMERGY servers, the ETERNUS storage system and the ETERNUS LT40 tape library, we now have an excellent disaster recovery concept. We‘re in a completely different league now in terms of reliability. With our high-performance, virtualized systems, we are incredibly flexible and can react quickly and without complication to the ever decreasing demands of the management team.“